Field of the Invention
The disclosure relates generally to management methods and related electronic devices, and, more particularly to methods for application management in an electronic device supporting hardware acceleration.
Description of the Related Art
Recently, electronic devices, such as mobile or handheld devices, have become more and more technically advanced and multifunctional. For example, a mobile device may receive email messages, have an advanced address book management application, allow for media playback, and have various other functions. Because of the conveniences of electronic devices with multiple functions, the devices have become necessities of life.
In recent years, there has been an exponential growth in applications used in an electronic device with a Google™ Android operating system, which has resulted in software programs, becoming widely available in supporting hardware acceleration. Beginning in Android 3.0 (API level 11), the Android 2D rendering pipeline is designed to better support hardware acceleration. Application developer is able to enabling hardware acceleration by defining the flags on its manifest or using proper APIs. Moreover, beginning in Android 4.0 (API level 14), the application's hardware acceleration is enabled in default if the application developer doesn't configure it specifically. During application execution, however, the hardware accelerations for all the applications being executed are all enabled or disabled after configuration. Moreover, not all of the applications support the hardware acceleration. For an application which not supports the hardware acceleration, enabling the hardware acceleration for this application during execution may result in a bad performance or may crash it.